Editorials

Last month, we warned Los Angeles County residents about a proposal zooming down Interstate 5 from Sacramento, a county government reform measure of dubious merit and motivation. The proposed Senate Constitutional Amendment 12, by Sen.

As Americans observed the 16th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. military action continued across the greater Mideast under the same old authorizations that lawmakers passed into law in 2001 and 2002.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has developed a plan to equip nearly 6,000 deputies with body cameras and policies for their use, according to Southern California Public Radio. Under the plan, the first year would be devoted to identifying a body camera vendor and get necessary infrastructure in place.

Despite all the housing-related proposals in Sacramento, lawmakers have apparently yet to learn that more government involvement, making housing more expensive and less profitable, is never going to solve the state’s housing affordability problems.

Seven-year spans play greatly into the life of JPL’s Cassini probe to Saturn. Launched in 1997, it took seven years to get to the ringed planet. That gas giant rotates on its axis so slowly that each of its seasons lasts seven Earth years.

Despite the objections of the state’s education establishment, low-income and underrepresented students in Los Angeles County stand to benefit from an innovative proposal to create a state-sponsored science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum for middle and high school.

The House Financial Services Committee will hold hearings into the massive data security breach at Equifax, but some lawmakers are not waiting to demand answers. The credit-reporting company disclosed last week that “criminals exploited a U.

On paper, California has done well during the economic recovery, but the high cost of living still makes it a difficult place in which to live and work. The Golden State’s economy is poised to surpass the United Kingdom’s as the fifth-largest in the world, but that prosperity is tenuous and rather unevenly distributed.

The Trump administration’s decision to rescind the immigration policy called DACA — unless Congress saves it — has renewed debate about the status of young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children.

In one of our era’s most dramatic moments on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. John McCain — fresh from brain surgery — delivered his colleagues a stark warning. Without a willingness to get their hands dirty, they’ll fail to do their duty as legislators, over and over again.

The arguments about the viability of and the necessity for charter-school education in California will remain legion, simply because the arguments on both sides of the question are so valid. The key point of charter advocates is that society and its children are infinitely better served when there are more schools of choice for more families.

It’s not that all Southern California fire seasons are the same, exactly. It’s more that all seasons are now fire seasons. This was especially true during the five long years of our state’s most recent drought, broken by welcome rains last winter and spring.

The California Supreme Court has upheld most of Proposition 66, the initiative to speed up the death penalty, but in doing so may have made an even more tangled mess of it. Associate Justice Carol Corrigan, writing for the majority, said voters were presented with ballot materials promising a five-year time limit on death penalty appeals in state courts, but there is “no workable means of enforcing the five-year review limit.

The Trump administration’s announcement that the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program will be rescinded should prompt needed congressional action to protect young immigrants whose sole offense was being brought here by their parents.

By The Editorial Board According to the United States Department of Agriculture, poorer communities in the San Gabriel Valley often share an unfortunate distinction, healthwise: They are simultaneously “food deserts” and “food swamps.

The Trump administration deserves great praise for ending Operation Choke Point, the controversial, and often tyrannical, program that harmed many legitimate businesses. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation set the stage for the discriminatory treatment of businesses when it declared certain industries to be engaged in “high-risk” activities, sending a strong signal to the banks it regulates that they should steer clear of doing business with these entities.

Developers are forever in search of a level playing field, insofar as government regulations apply to their work. With city, county, state and federal rules to follow, there’s already a lot to keep up with without — to mix our football metaphors — the goal posts being moved as well.

Amid a concerted campaign by teachers unions to undermine school choice, national support for charter schools has taken a hit. According to the results of an annual survey by the K-12 education journal Education Next, only

In times of crisis, Americans must set aside geographic and political differences and unite to help their fellow human beings. Hurricane Harvey, the first Category 4 hurricane to hit the United States in more than a decade, has devastated communities across southeast Texas.

President Trump granted a pardon on Friday to Joe Arpaio, the former and longtime sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. It wasn’t much of a surprise. The president had signaled his intent to pardon the controversial 85-year-old lawman in a campaign rally three days earlier in Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa County.

By The Editorial Board Five years ago, Los Angeles County voters decided it was necessary to require the use of condoms in adult film productions by passing Measure B. The only real winners since the passage of Measure B have been lawyers and moralists.

On Monday, President Trump lifted Obama-era restrictions on the federal 1033 Program that distributes surplus military equipment to local police departments. Trump’s executive order speciously characterizes the move as merely “restoring state, tribal, and local law enforcement’s access to life-saving equipment and resources.

The one thing most everyone expected from the White House this year — a big new infrastructure deal — now looks dead in the water. How bad a setback is it? “Infrastructure Week” wrapped up with President Donald Trump pulling the plug on his own Advisory Council on Infrastructure.

Lawsuits against companies by disgruntled former employees are common enough, as are companies’ statements that they decline to comment on pending litigation. So we won’t know both sides of the discrimination story told by a married lesbian couple from Alhambra until their case plays out in the courts.

Police officers in California killed 157 people in 2016, according to a recently released report from the state Attorney General’s Office, with one-third of fatal incidents occurring in Los Angeles County.

We applaud Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s decision that no changes should be made to the Sand to Snow National Monument here in the Inland Empire. Let’s hope that decision, announced last week, was a preview of the decisions to follow on the fate of other Southern California monuments as the review period ends today.

Pasadena’s police department, the largest in the San Gabriel Valley, does much of its work exceptionally well, serving a community that is extraordinarily demographically diverse and performing big-city tasks — security for the world parties of the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl Game, for instance — on a medium-city budget.

The latest terror attack perpetrated by the Islamic State — this time against the civilians of Barcelona — makes two harsh facts painfully clear. First, the strategy of confronting international terrorism as a global policing problem just isn’t working well enough.

After a long review of America’s disappointing military strategy in Afghanistan, President Trump announced a new plan that’s light on details and heavy on familiar messaging. It’s a far cry from the big change many in the administration — and many Americans — had been pulling for.

There are some indications that Clifford Rechtschaffen, one of Gov. Jerry Brown’s two latest appointments to the state Public Utilities Commission, would be more of an advocate for utilities than for consumers, ratepayers and those adversely affected by environmental issues.

It would be an understatement to describe President Trump’s comments this past week in the aftermath of racist rallies and ensuing violence in Charlottesville as tone deaf. His initial response gave enough reason to shudder but on Thursday, in an all-too-familiar barrage of tweets, he sadly accented his already troubling response to a volatile situation by lamenting the loss of “beautiful statues and monuments.

The Dodgers are having one of the greatest seasons baseball fans have ever seen. Unfortunately, for many in Los Angeles, it’s the greatest season they’ve never seen. This is the fourth year since the Dodgers sold their local television rights for $8.

While the question “National monuments, are they good or bad?” has been a heated one ever since the Trump administration began in April reviewing the monuments by President Barack Obama and his predecessors back to 1996, the issue is particularly hot this month.

An innovative, off-stream water storage proposal northeast of Sacramento should be one of the top priorities for the state’s spending of Proposition 1 water-bond money. The Sites Reservoir project would, in wet years, divert “excess” water from the Sacramento River into what would be the seventh-largest reservoir in California.

Public-private partnerships in space travel hold much promise, and greater cost-efficiency, but government should be transparent about the risks and inevitable failures. On Monday, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, conducted a successful launch of a resupply mission to the International Space Station, or ISS, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the company’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket returning safely to SpaceX’s landing zone at Cape Canaveral.

One thing all Americans should be able to agree on is that it’s time for a change of course in Afghanistan. Our current path is untenable. The Obama administration didn’t deliver the seeming victory that propelled him to a second term in office.

The proposal to expand the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is back — and no better than ever. Senate Constitutional Amendment 12, moving through the California Legislature, is a little different from previous plans that were rejected by state lawmakers and L.

More than 60 percent of voters in the city of Pasadena said yes to marijuana legalization in California through Proposition 64 in November 2016. But, as with so many other area cities, local electeds there continue to decline to allow clinics that fill medical prescriptions for cannabis to operate, and say they won’t allow stores that should be legal statewide for recreational marijuana when that system begins in January.

Something the Trump and Obama administrations agree on: occupational licensing laws need to be reformed. In a speech delivered July 21, U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta called on state legislators to reform occupational licensing laws which, he argues, are too often used “to limit competition, bar entry, or create a privileged class.

All who support journalism’s constitutional check on the government should push back against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ threat to make it easier to subpoena reporters. After being excoriated by President Trump for being “very weak” on executive branch leaks, Sessions pledged Friday to rein in unauthorized disclosures of information by government officials.

Retailers, shippers and consumers breathed a sigh of relief as a first-of-its-kind contract extension was approved by dockworkers at all West Coast ports. The extension, ensuring labor peace at 29 ports in California, Oregon and Washington until 2022, was hailed by management and union officials who wanted to avoid labor strife that devastated the economy in 2014-15.

Local residential zoning ordinances can go a little bit far. In San Marino, for instance, residents must park their cars in their garages, those outbuildings the rest of us sensibly use for piling up junk we don’t currently want in the house.